Friday, June 27, 2014

In 2014, there is a new hot band every 12 hours—or less. Thanks,
Internet. Who can keep up? What permeates through the noise?

Erika M. Anderson is EMA; this, her third album and first for
Matador, came out three months ago. It could easily get lost in the shuffle:
it’s dense and rewarding and doesn’t lend itself easily to first impressions.
It’s the kind of album in which no one seems to have the time to invest
anymore. Small wonder, then, that it is in part a meditation on the dearth of
humanity in the voyeurism of online culture. “When everybody’s lookin’ / it’s supposed
to be a dream,” she sings. “But disassociation, I guess it’s just a modern
disease.”

Anderson manifests digital noise quite literally: the first thing
we hear is a blast of white noise, followed by a lowest-of-the-low bass tone
mixed with an ear-splitting treble frequency. (She spent some formative years
in noise rock circles in the Bay Area.) Then EMA’s voice comes in with a
sing-song melody—about satellites hovering over the chaos of Earth—to tie it
all together. For all her love of distorted electronics, EMA has an equally
sweet side: songs like “When She Comes” and “3Jane” are dependent on pianos and
acoustic guitars; they are as easy on the ears as the howls of “Smoulder” are
abrasive and emotionally raw. When she walks the middle ground, as on “So
Blonde,” the result is reminiscent of a surefire mid-’90s alt-rock single. Rare
is the young artist willing—or able—to show off so many sides of her artistic
vision, yet Anderson does so with complete confidence, to say nothing of her
songs and serious skills.

Anderson is 27 years old. That makes it a bit odd to hear her
condemning someone for “making a living off of taking selfies … it’s such a
narcissistic baby / it’s such a new millennial baby.” Considering the depth and
maturity heard on The Future’s Void, it’s obvious Anderson is in this for the
long haul.
(June 26)

Born and raised in Kuwait, currently
living in London and New York, Fatima Al Qadiri has never been to China. Yet
she’s fascinated by the music of that country—more specifically, how the rest
of the world understands Chinese music: its tonalities, its scale, how it’s
been interpreted by Western ears over centuries. She describes Asiatisch as “a
virtual road trip through imagined China.”

What a Chinese musician might think
of this, no one’s bothered to ask; Qadiri was raised literally in between China
and London—to which her style of electronic music owes its largest debt,
specifically her icy, noir-ish labelmates on the Hyperdub label—so she’s
arguably more entitled to this exploration than, say, some white guy from
Wyoming.

The politics of her approach aside,
Asiatisch is bewitching and fascinating, both melodically and texturally. This
is not beat music; Qadiri opts for a more cinematic, dreamlike approach. She
also has a penchant for unfashionably out-of-date synths, i.e. ones from the
late ’80s, which fit her contextual motif perfectly: the sounds that are too
cheezy to be either vintage or forward-looking are perfectly in line with the
anomaly that is current Asian pop music, which appropriates many of Western
pop’s worst habits 20 years later.

That manifests itself in the bizarre,
ersatz cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” sung by guest
vocalist Helen Feng. Rather, it’s not exactly a cover: it’s titled “Shanzai,”
for one thing, and takes just enough liberties with the melody that it might
withstand a court challenge for plagiarism. It’s disorienting, haunting and
oddly beautiful: no wonder Qadiri chose it as the opening track, setting up the
rest of her conceit perfectly. (June 26)

Download: “Szechuan,” “Wudang,”
“Shanghai Freeway”

John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts
(Nevado)

I don’t normally review albums more than a year old. But I
had never heard of John Grant before now. Or maybe I had: Pitchfork and Mojo
and The Guardian and Sinead O’Connor and Elton John are all huge fans; O’Connor
has covered him, and Elton John invited Grant to be on his self-curated tribute
to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Grant’s non-descript birth name
doesn’t do him any favours in the recognition department. What makes more of an
impression than anything else is the phrases tumbling out of his mouth,
articulating the unthinkable—comparing a lover’s silence to Agent Orange—and
using words like callypigian (look it up, it’s a good one).

In an album chock full of quotable
moments, nothing beats this chorus, set to a tune worthy of Tom Petty: “I am the greatest motherf--ker that you’re ever going to meet /
from the top of my head down to the tips of the toes on my feet / Go ahead and love me while it’s still a crime / don’t forget,
you could be laughing 65 per cent more of the time.”

This baritone bear of a man, a failed
alt-rock musician from Colorado who relocated to Iceland (where he wrote that
country’s 2014 Eurovision entry), pens lush ballads and electro pop, both
equally strange and profane, that sound like no one else—except perhaps a
strange amalgam of Buck 65 and the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt. Maybe Pink
Floyd and Kraftwerk setting Lou Reed diaries to music, only with a much greater
sense of melody. Maybe—nope, I can’t do it. John Grant is a rare and beautiful
bird. End of story. His name and face might be easily camouflaged in the crowd,
but these are songs you will never forget. (June 19)

Download: “Blackbelt,” “GMF,” “You
Don’t Have To”

Hedwig and the Angry Inch – Broadway
Cast Recording (Warner)

The greatest rock music of our time
debuted 15 years ago off-Broadway; the 2001 film, starring creator John Cameron
Mitchell, became a cult hit, and this year a Broadway remount of the show,
starring Neil Patrick Harris, nabbed four Tony awards: hence this new cast
recording.

“It’s funny how things work out,”
Mitchell told the Toronto Star last week. “The original show was never a big
money-maker, the movie was initially a flop, although Hedwig is always playing
somewhere around the world. It’s so popular in Korea they even had a TV reality
show to pick the next Hedwig in the last production.”

The story of Hedwig is threadbare:
its appeal lies entirely in the title character, a failed glam rock singer who
suffered a botched sex-change operation, and her relationship with a protégé
who steals all her songs and becomes a star. Hedwig is both hilarious and
tragic, but it’s the songs—by Mitchell and Stephen Trask—that transform it from
a curiosity into a triumph. There’s already a cast recording from the
off-Broadway version, the soundtrack to the film, and a tribute album (Wig in a
Box) featuring Cyndi Lauper, Rufus Wainwright, Spoon, Sleater-Kinney and more.
Do we need to hear these songs again?

Yes. For all its cult popularity,
Hedwig still needed a proper, modern recording. The tribute album, worthy as it
is, is more interpretive than reverent. The energy of the band here is more
pronounced here than on either soundtrack featuring Mitchell, and the
production is full of punch. Perhaps needless to say, Tony winner Harris is
fantastic, as is his female foil, Lena Hall. As a bonus, there’s one new song,
“When Love Explodes (Love Theme from Hurt Locker)”: “Love can be scary in the
hurt locker / it’s tender and it’s raw and filled with shock and awe / and we
will be consumed when love explodes.”

Every one of these songs deserves to
be an American classic, and this is the recording to make the case. Hair?
Tommy? Jersey Boys? American Idiot? Please. Hedwig rules them all. (June 26)

Download: “Tear Me Down,” “Wicked
Little Town,” “Wig in a Box”

Hamilton Leithauser - Black Hours
(Ribbon)

Some voices are too big for
rock’n’roll. Hamilton Leithauser certainly had sublime moments as frontman for
the Walkmen, but at some point the bombast started to sound suffocating. Here,
on his solo debut, Leithauser and Walkmen guitarist Paul Maroon strip
everything down and steps into noir-ish cabaret mode (hence the title, no
doubt), adding marimba and the Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman on backing
vocals when they see fit. Given room to roam over this moody, often atmospheric
collection, Leithauser proves what a remarkable vocalist he truly is. He only
disappoints on the tracks that sound merely like the Walkmen unplugged. Someone
send this guy to Broadway. (June 12)

Download: “5 AM,” “The Silent
Orchestra,” “Bless Your Heart”

Corb Lund – Counterfeiters Blues (New
West)

Corb Lund and his Hurtin’ Albertans
are a barn-burning live act, and have been for more than a decade. This is
their first live album—of sorts. With seven fine albums behind him, Lund is
consistently converting new fans—many of whom surely don’t know where to start
with his back catalogue. Counterfeiters Blues is not a live album, but it finds
Lund and his band revisiting his two bestsellers—2002’s stone-cold classic Five
Dollar Bill and 2005’s Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer—by recording
selected songs from them live at Memphis’s fabled Sun Studios (former home to
Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.).

These are songs that these boys know
inside out—and it shows. Playing the title tracks and crowd-pleasers like
“Shine Up My Boots” or “Roughest Neck Around” is surely little more than muscle
memory by now, but it comes off as a lot more than that. You could argue that
these veterans were in awe of their historic surroundings in Memphis, but the
truth is that they probably sound like this every night. This is a well-oiled
machine that gets better with age, especially guitarist Grant Siemens.

Lund doesn’t need a nostalgia trip;
his last album, 2012’s Cabin Fever, was easily one of his best. But this
collection, which accompanies a television special about the session (included
with the CD), is a welcome treat for fans old
and new. (June 19)

Your summer should sound like this:
drunk, demented, delirious—and South American. This is what your World Cup
party feels like after your underdog team beats all odds and you find yourself
using a vuvuzela to imbibe multi-coloured sugary drinks you’ve never seen
before, kissing people in the street and waking up in a strange part of town.

Elbis Alvarrez is the one-man
operation from Bogota calling himself Meridian Brothers. On his third
international release—not counting his side projects, including the
mind-melting Los Piranas—he mashes together every equatorial genre of music
(cumbia, calypso, reggae, samba) and escorts you through a funhouse of mirrors.
Whether you dance or just sit there dazed is up to you.

Alvarrez has a simple methodology:
set up a killer percussion track, employ minimal rhythm guitar, and then wig
out on either processed lead guitar or fuzzy organs that sound like bees—all
while cackling maniacally. Evil genius, or just plain genius? Maybe just the
album of the summer. (June 19)

Perhaps the most underrated Canadian
hip-hop record of 2013 was Water, by Toronto producer KJ, where the dark,
ominous beats put to shame the considerably more acclaimed work of Drake and
The Weeknd; together, they all make Toronto seem like one spooky place. Now comes singer Shi Wisdom, with KJ behind the boards, and she injects some
badly needed estrogen into the scene. Her ultra-cool coo is nothing short of
chilling on “Young Gunner,” a harrowing tale of urban violence; that track
alone should catapult her into the larger consciousness. But she has a softer
and sultry side, too, one that aspires to be “sipping champagne on a
yacht”—even if her uneasy aural surroundings suggest that to be more
aspirational than immediately attainable. With a voice like that, however—and
with KJ in her corner—surely it’s only a matter of time. (June 12)

Download: “The Key,” “Fly Too,”
“Young Gunner”

Slakah the Beatchild - Soul Movement
Vol. 2 (BBE)

Hip-hop has been sounding a lot less
funky lately—thanks, Drake and Kanye. “Old school” no longer means a throwback
to the ’80s or the Golden Age of the early ‘90s; by channelling the broken beat
movement and neo-soul of the early 2000s, Toronto producer Slakah the
Beatchild—on whose previous album Drake was a guest MC—now sounds positively
retro, and better for it. The first lyrics you hear come from MC Spek Won,
setting the tone: “Starts with a boom, ends with a bap, it’s in between the
boom and the bap is the gap / in between the gap is where the magic happens / a
chemical reaction.”

The last Slakah record came out under
his rock/pop guise, the Slakadeliqs; it landed on the Polaris Prize long list
and got a fair amount of attention, but I found it limp and uninspired. This, however,
proves that he’s much more than just a genre dabbler; these tight and jazzy
grooves, many of which turn themselves inside out over the course of a track,
are the product of a serious vision. Guest vocalists include powerhouse soul
sister Tanika Charles, newcomer Ayah and the long-lost Glenn Lewis, but they
all take a back seat to the beats—and the Beatchild. (June 12)

If I told you this was an
instrumental guitar rock record, I wouldn’t blame you for running away
screaming. The genre is usually the domain of masturbatory showboaters who just
don’t know when to shut up and sit back. Nashville’s William Tyler, however, is
a much more delicate man than that. Having grown up as a young wunderkind
playing sideman in older people’s bands (Lambchop, Silver Jews), Tyler has a
deep reverence for both mainstream country (his parents are hit songwriters)
and the avant-garde (he’s a big fan of Krautrock band Neu!; here, he covers a
solo track by that band’s guitarist, Michael Rother). On this EP, which follows
up two acclaimed albums of solo, fingerpicked electric guitar compositions,
Tyler employs a backing band to allow him to explore psychedelic textures,
hammer out droning power chords over a driving rhythm section, and bring the
subtle virtuosity he displayed as a sideman to the forefront. Tyler’s version
of Americana draws from so much more than cliché country or rock forms; this is
a man whose guitar speaks many languages. (June 19)

Download: all three songs

Viet Cong – Cassette (Mexican Summer)

Matt Flegel and Matt Wallace are not
Vietnamese, yet they are Viet Cong. They are also not women, yet they used to
be one-half of the Calgary band Women. When they don’t claim to be anything at
all, they’ve been known to be sidemen for freaky fractured folk guy Chad Van
Gaalen. As Viet Cong, they play catchy, ramshackle and reverb-heavy garage rock
that owes a debt to early ’80s British post-punk: opening track “Throw It Away”
is a dead ringer for The Jam, while “Structureless Design” is downright goth.
Psychedelic touches colour the edges, and they make the most out of their
decidedly lo-fi sound. A full-length album is currently being recorded with
Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck, Metz); look for it to be some of the most glorious
noise of the year. (June 12)

Download: “Throw It Away,” “Static
Wall,” “Unconscious Melody”

Jack White – Lazaretto (Third
Man/Sony)

No artist wants to launch a new album
with a public apology. A week before Lazaretto’s release, Jack White was quoted
in Rolling Stone dissing various peers; this, along with messy details of his
divorce last year, didn’t do well to endear him to the record-buying public. So
he quickly issued a long apology on his website, claiming he was quoted out of
context and has nothing but respect and/or love for those artists allegedly
caught in his crosshairs. (Widely reposted, the original post in question has
mysteriously been taken down.) “Would You Fight For My Love?” asks White in the
title of one of his new tracks. Long-time fans may be beginning to wonder.

Maybe Jack White is a bit of an ass.
Maybe he’s not. He certainly has terrible hair these days, for what it’s worth.
But if we approach his music on its own terms, White gives us plenty of reason
to stand by our man. His first solo album, 2012’s Blunderbuss, sounded like
White suddenly liberated from the constraints of each of his other three bands;
here his eclectic tastes crystallize into a far more potent punch. Country
fiddles collide with blues riffs on heavy garage rock with R&B beats, and
White makes it all sound effortless. (It wasn’t; uncharacteristically for
White, he spent much longer than a week on this record.) He even does it while
using two completely different full bands—one male, one female—each of which
boasts killer keyboardists, pedal steel players and funky drummers, each of
which bring out the best in him. Perhaps needless to say, his guitar sound is
monstrous, and he plays with more fire than he has in ages—it’s probably the
divorce talking. (The lyrics back up this thesis.)

If you only read the rock’n’roll
gossip pages, you might want Jack White to fail. But once you hear this record,
you can be sure that he hasn’t. (June 12)

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

I didn’t mention there that I had predicted 29/40 in my previous post.

Here are the 11 I got wrong:

36? – This is the one I’m most disappointed in. It was on my ballot.
More people should hear it. But as a direct result of this discussion, one
programmer at a major Canadian festival told me he put the band “at the top of
the pile.” (Aside: What does that mean in 2014? He still listens to discs? He
puts their MP3s at the top of his playlist?)

Braids – Slightly shocking, considering their last record was
shortlisted in 2011—and this one is better.

Kevin Drew – Kind of shocking, considering Drew’s profile and
the strength of this record. Yet his last solo album didn’t make a long list
either. Did “Mexican Aftershow Party” kill any buzz this time?

Duck Sauce – Seeing how this album follows up a hit single three
years ago, not that shocking.

Egyptrixx – Not surprising; honestly, I had it as a long shot.

Hidden Cameras – I thought this was their strongest album in
many moons; clearly I was one of the only ones.

Lindi Ortega – I didn’t hear half as much chatter about her
latest record as I did the long-listed one that preceded it, so perhaps not
surprising.

Doug Paisley – Many people were shocked Paisley didn’t make it,
considering his increased profile. Yet, as a big fan of the guy myself, I
didn’t find Strong Feelings anywhere near as compelling as Constant Companion,
so this didn’t surprise me.

Slakah the Beatchild – This is an unfortunate omission; there’s
never enough hip-hop and R&B on the list, and this is one of the stronger
Canadian releases of either genre I’ve heard in a while. Now if Shad had beats
like this, he’d be unstoppable. Can someone please put those two together?

Other albums I would have loved to see get some Polaris recognition, but didn't: Nick Buzz, Shane Abram Nelken, Adrian Raso and Fanfare Ciocarlia. But hey, my #1 pick, AroarA, made the list.

2014 long-listers that surprised me:

Chromeo – This album is rather new; I hadn’t heard it at the
time I voted, and I falsely assumed most jurors didn’t take this band seriously.

Cousins – I’m allergic to most things that remind me of lo-fi
’90s indie rock; I’ll admit I didn’t pay any attention to this band after
hearing the record once or twice.

Cowboy Junkies’ Kennedy Suite – This is a shocker, considering
what a squandering of talent is involved. So many great people involved; maybe
one or two songs worthy of them to sing.

Frog Eyes – I’m really excited to see this on the list, as Frog
Eyes is a unique force in Canadian music. That said, I hadn’t heard the album
at the time of voting; it was released several months ago to extremely low
profile, and put out properly by Paper Bag merely a few weeks ago.

Mounties – I did not think Polaris jurors still
followed the careers of Hawksley Workman and Hot Hot Heat.

Odonis Odonis – Not that surprising, as this record has had good
buzz. But it is surprising when you actually listen to it. Really? I also thought it
might just have Toronto appeal.

Philippe B – I wasn’t sure who else other than Jimmy Hunt and
Dead Obie$ would rep franco Quebec, so this was a pleasant surprise.

Thus Owls – The Toronto Star’s Ben Rayner firmly believes this
band is the second coming. I wasn’t sure who else agreed with him. Was he
allowed to fill in all five slots on his ballot with Thus Owls?

Tim Hecker – Not at all surprising, considering he’s been
long-listed twice before. But I didn’t sense that this had the same momentum as
either An Imaginary Country or Ravedeath 1972.

And the unexpected bonus round this year goes to Winnipeg’s Greg
McPherson, who got left off the long list due to some kind of computer glitch
in voting. Polaris is not removing anything from the list—for obvious reasons
of optics, logistics and politics—so there is, in fact, 41 albums on this year’s
long list.